Academic research, even the kind that appears at issues closest to ‘real life’, often remains distanced from public debate. Academic voices, especially those stimulating critical reimagination, are hardly heard. But we have to encourage the media, and ultimately the general public, to seem more critically at employability – a theme this is discussed from quite a lot of angles, but is put under little critical scrutiny today.
The concept of employability – or no less than the only most familiar to us – appeared within the 1980s. It was introduced by corporations, marketed as a response to the necessity to be flexible within the face of world competition, adapting to the unstable economic environment. Companies, it’s been claimed, could not offer job security to employees and introduced ’employability’ instead, because the new psychological contract. As such, it forms section of ‘the new spirit of capitalism’ (outlined by Luc Boltanski and Eve Chiapello in 2005), substituting a lifelong career in a single organisation by a career of diverse temporary projects which promise to make individuals employable to take in further short-term projects.
Employability was met with suspicion even within mainstream business schools, and was considered an idea that employees, even HR managers, doesn’t buy into. Clearly it was not an equal substitute for job security. Yet, it gained the higher hand. Employability was taken up by governments who joined hands with the business world, and, not with the ability to influence labour demand, they built the full government policy around labour supply – or employability.
This meant that governments, in preference to creating jobs, helped the unemployed to enhance their employability, in addition to making unemployment benefits depending on it, with getting out of unemployment becoming the individuals’ responsibility. These policies were also criticised, both within academia and on public levels. Within the Guardian there have been also articles that did this, as an example criticising employability as an “unworkable theory”. This was in 1999.
So what has happened since then with this ‘unworkable theory’ The employability agenda have been at the rise, boosted with the deterioration of conditions within the labour market, specially across the time of the commercial crisis. It has entered areas where it didn’t have one of these role before, most notably becoming a vital portion of the brand new university agenda, even something at the basis of which university courses might cease to exist.
As employability gains in positive connotation and becomes a growing number of normative in practice, let’s take into account that it is a neoliberal project that emphasises individuals’ responsibility for his or her successes and screw ups within the labour market, and making people believe that it can be as a result of their insufficient employability that they can not get a role, instead of the condition of the final market.
More than that, the language of employability (skills, flexibility, adaptability, marketability) works towards shaping people in certain ways, with people whose personal values falling out of what employability asks for deemed as unemployable.
The idea that came into use because of labour market insecurity became the answer to a different labour market insecurity, entering not just employers’ practices and government policies, but people’s daily lives and identities. While its alluring guise was recognised and debated then, it’s hardly the case now.
Employability have been addressed lots over the last decade but there’s a definite loss of articles observing it critically. There are articles on means which make people more employable and employability of various groups of folk. There are even seminars organised with employability specialists mostly discussing its functionality and implementation, but not covering its problems, where it comes from or whether universities and other educational bodies really want this move towards employability.
Despite being denounced by some voices within the 1990s, employability has since become a largely unquestioned portion of the media realm, becoming “naturalised logic”, in Norman Fairclough’s 1989 terms, with its ideological nature stronger than ever.
What we now may even see in materials published by the media is an absolute acceptance of employability, talking about it in almost a neutral way. The sole area where employability continues to be challenged are certain strands of educational research (for instance the forthcoming special issue of Ephemera, ‘Giving Notice to Employability’), but this critique continues to be marginal compared to the dominant discussion.
The discussion of employability, including questioning its undertones, ought to be brought back into public debate. It must also be linked with other important issues in society (job cuts, austerity measures, consequences of the crisis) and viewed from a unique angle – not as a remedy for these kind of issues on the individual level, but as section of the issue.
Ekaterina Chertkovskaya is a PhD student on the School of commercial and Economics at Loughborough University – follow it on Twitter @lborouniversity
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